The Glenroyal based in Maynooth, Co. Kildare offers excellent value accommodation, superb facilities in their newly refurbished 4-star hotel. After beginning their partnership with Core Optimisation in January 2019, soon after we were asked to grow direct business for the property through Facebook Advertising. The goal was to increase leisure and family business, capitalize on their current corporate base and increase brand awareness through social media.

TO BEGIN

The Glenroyal Hotel began its partnership with Core Optimisation in January 2019. Our collaborative goal was to generate higher levels of occupancy and increase revenue through digital channels alongside growing their online presence.

When we asked Ted Robinson, General Manager of The Glenroyal Hotel, why they chose Core Optimisation he said…

“I have worked closely with Core over the last 6 months and I can highly recommend them to any other hotels. They have worked with us to develop and improve our Book Direct Strategy. The service they provide is outstanding and has brought a positive impact to our business. Our Revenue has increased significantly since beginning our journey with them. Caroline, David, Denise and the team have always been helpful and a pleasure to work with.”

THE BRIEF

The main objective was to grow direct business for the property through Facebook/Instagram Advertising. The goal was to increase leisure and family business, capitalize on their current corporate base and increase brand awareness through social media.

Alongside our overall digital strategy for the company, we completed an in-depth analysis of current performance and once this was complete we could begin to work towards our goals with a clearer understanding of the job at hand. From this audit, we could see the gaps that we could explore to increase revenue in the UK and Domestic markets. The main objectives for this campaign were to increase bedroom revenue to drive brand awareness, customer ownership and to target new business.

With this in mind, we could begin devising the strategy and restructuring the Glenroyals social adverts to reach new customers.

DEVISING A STRATEGY

We needed to decide what would be the most effective and appropriate method to reach out to potential customers for The Glenroyal Hotel. The Facebook Strategy we used focused on attracting the right type of customer for the hotel through a range of different ad types.

Using the Funnel

-> Reach & Traffic Campaigns

This involved creating a reach/traffic specific advert for each campaign. Using a broader stroke audience targeting we can drive potential customers to a specific landing page with the goal of conversion or remarketing later. This also allows us to begin audience segmentation which is the process of dividing people into subgroups based upon defined criterion such as interests, demographics and so on.

-> Conversion & Remarketing Campaigns

We introduced a new model to be more conservative and targeted with the budget to drive revenue at a lower cost. Each campaign would contain a conversion/remarketing adset to retarget previous redirects to the landing page, previously booked users or someone on the site in the last 60-90 days (decided on a campaign to campaign basis).

Remarketing Campaigns show ads to people who have previously visited your website and provide you with extra features specifically for reaching previous visitors.

-> Bid Adjustments

Bid adjustments are done so as to ensure that clients budgets on FB Advertising are being distributed to the highest converting audiences.

Audience Specific

-> Graphics & Copy

Leveraging social media advertising to increase brand awareness and using re-marketing strategies to promote booking will only work when the imagery and ad copy is on-brand, consistent and engaging to our target demographic. Working alongside the client we were able to create eye-catching imagery relevant to specific campaigns such as Family Breaks or Golden Years while remaining on-brand.

-> Audience Targeting

We created audiences on an ad to ad basis to specifically target potential customers. Alongside custom created audiences by campaign we also implemented lookalike audiences after the initial learning phase was complete, this allows us to target a more specific customer thus allowing us to increase bidding on the most relevant or likely to convert customer segments.

Events & Promotions

-> Special offers & Events

Alongside a set of “Always On” campaigns, leveraging the properties of upcoming events and current special offers were always going to be important for driving direct revenue. Working with the property we were able to create campaigns containing both ticket and overnight deals for on-site gigs while separating promoting Summer Sales rates or Mid-term packages, each which will have their own audience to target. This allows the hotel to raise awareness across multiple demographics which will be useful in the future for creating lookalike audiences based on previous purchases.

-> Content development

Here we built onto their current content strategy to develop new pages for their site to direct potential customers to specific areas to increase conversion.

Collaboration 

Through our work with the client in other areas of their business where page content was expanded or new content created to attract customers, these pages can also be used as landing pages for FB ad to direct customers to the relevant pages without the need to search. As a result, The Glenroyal site can attract potential customers to pages, increase brand awareness and position the hotel as the perfect destination for leisure or business.

We also worked closely with the revenue manager to ensure that we saw an increase in conversion through their own internal booking engine, leveraging the additional traffic for higher occupancy and revenue.